Verbal learning and memory in Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia using the CVLT-II SF

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 35-41)Across the literature, patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) have been observed to exhibit significantly greater impairments on memory tasks in early stages of the disease than patients with Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). The purpose of the current study was to examine learning and memory patterns in AD and FTD using the short-form version of the California Verbal Learning Test-II (CVLT-II SF), which was specifically designed for use with dementia and other cognitively impaired populations. Twelve patients with FTD and 30 AD patients matched in disease severity with use of the Mini Mental State Exam participated. Thirty healthy older adults also served as controls. All participants were administered the CVLT-II SF, which requires participants to learn a list of 9 items, drawn from 3 categories, over four learning trials. Various CVLT-II SF outcome measures, including free-recall of the 9 items after a I 0-min delay, cued-recall (providing category of items as cues), learning slope, semantic clustering, and recognition memory were obtained for each participant. One-way ANCOVAs, covarying for age, were performed in order to examine performance differences between the groups on the CVL T-II SF. The analyses revealed significant group differences across all variables, except semantic clustering (p values <.05). Post hoc analyses, however, revealed no significant differences between the FTD and AD patient groups. In order to possibly reduce within-group variability, patients were subdivided into mild and medium disease severity groups for further analyses. 2x2 ANCOV As revealed no significant interaction between disease severity and diagnosis on the outcome variables of the CVLT-lI SF. However, a significant main effect for disease severity, indicating poorer perform ance by the moderate ly- re lative to the mildl y-impaired group, was observed across all variables, except for learning curve and semantic clustering. These findings suggest that the CVLT-II SF is a useful tool for discriminating between dementia and normal older adults, but may not discriminate between patients with differing forms of dementia